Extending the Marketing Dialog on Poverty

We appreciate Professor Aneel Karnani’s contributions to the marketing dialog on poverty and our article “Marketing’s Lost Frontier: The Poor” (Achrol and Kotler 2016). We do not necessarily disagree with some of his criticisms but rather see them as an opportunity for expanding the discussion of marketing’s role in reducing world poverty. In this response, we revisit and elaborate on Social Marketing for the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) and Distributed Production-Consumption view presented in the original article. These new marketing models – focused on distributing economic opportunity, income and standards of life to local communities – can substantially displace the giant centralized manufacturing systems and urban based services economy, and usher in a new era of diminished poverty and industrial renewal

Procedimientos de Control de Calidad de Uniones Soldas por FCAW para la Fabricación de un Tanque de Almacenaje para Agua Industrial

Ante la demanda de nuevas ampliaciones en la minería, petroleras, petroquímica y otras industrias; son utilizados distintos tipos de recipientes para almacenar una gran variedad de productos. Los tanques de almacenamiento forman parte de distintas operaciones en la industria; tales como, producción, tratamiento, transporte, refinación, distribución, inventario, reservas y servicios; estos recipientes deben ser renovados cada cierto tiempo, por el desgaste, el deterioro ambiental, exigencias de trabajo, operación de trabajo o diseño no adecuado. Con el fin de satisfacer las necesidades de la rápida demanda de la fabricación de tanques de alta calidad, para la minería e industria se debe certificar un buen servicio de funcionamiento del tanque y para esto se requiere requisitos mínimos de control de calidad de las uniones soldadas, así como los materiales, la fabricación, las pruebas, los ensayos destructivos y no destructivos en la construcción de recipientes de acero soldados a temperatura atmosférica. El control de las uniones soldadas podría definirse como el conjunto de actividades encaminadas a asegurar la fiabilidad de un conjunto soldado, mediante la verificación del mismo por medios adecuados durante diferentes fases del proceso productivo. El propósito de esta tesis ha sido estructurar un sistema de control de inspección de uniones soldadas, de acuerdo a los estándares y normas internacionales que garanticen una construcción optima de tanques para el almacenaje, se optimizo y mejora los controles del diseño y fabricación planteándose un sistema de control de calidad bajo los estándares internacionales. Al evaluar el sistema se llegó a la conclusión que, al mejorar el control de calidad de los procesos de soldadura, se mejora también el sistema de control de calidad de todo el proceso de fabricación del tanque, por tanto, se tiene un efecto en reducción de costes debido a la reducción de los reprocesos, fallos etc. y también un aumento de la producción. Palabras claves: Calidad, procedimiento, soldadura, uniones, almacenamiento, tanques.Tesi

Positioning the Destination Product-Can Regional Tourist Boards Learn from Private Sector Practice?

This article examines the role of positioning in the marketing of a tourism destination. The study focuses on the current positioning strategies pursued by the Regional Tourist Boards (RTBs) in England. A recent nationwide consumer research study into short holiday destination choice in the UK revealed that consumers were confused by the regional product message. The evidence suggests that current RTB positioning strategies are failing to keep pace with the constantly evolving needs of the consumer. This article explores the reasons for clearly positioning the destination product and suggests that, although RTBs could learn from marketing strategies employed in other sectors of the tourism industry, there are likely to be organisational and cultural barriers inhibiting this learning curve

Image, brand and price info: do they always matter the same?

We study attention processes to brand, price and visual information about products in online retailing websites, simultaneously considering the effects of consumers’ goals, purchase category and consumers’ statements. We use an intra-subject experimental design, simulated web stores and a combination of observational eye-tracking data and declarative measures. Image information about the product is the more important stimulus, regardless of the task at hand or the store involved. The roles of brand and price information are dependent on the product category and the purchase task involved. Declarative measures of relative brand importance are found to be positively related with its observed importance

(De)marketing to Manage Consumer Quality Inferences

Savvy consumers attribute a product’s market performance to its intrinsic quality as well as the seller’s marketing push. The authors study how sellers should optimize their marketing decisions in response. They find that a seller can benefit from “demarketing” its product, meaning visibly toning down its marketing efforts. Demarketing lowers expected sales ex ante but improves product quality image ex post, as consumers attribute good sales to superior quality and lackluster sales to insufficient marketing. The authors derive conditions under which demarketing can be a recommendable business strategy. A series of experiments confirm these prediction

Customizing hybrid products

We explore how the convergence of the digital and physical into hybrid products leads to new possibilities for customization. We report on a technology probe, a hybrid advent calendar with both paper form and digital layers of content, both of which were designed to be customizable. We reveal how over two hundred active users adapted its physical and digital aspects in various ways, some anticipated and familiar, but others surprising. This leads us to contribute concepts to help understand and design for hybrid customization – the idea of broad customization spanning physical and digital; end-to-end customization by different stakeholders along the value chain for a product; and the combination of these into customization maps